Functional traits of arctic benthic invertebrates

This dataset contains the coding for 11 functional traits of arctic marine benthic invertebrates, occurring in the northern Bering Sea and Chukchi Sea. The traits include body size, body form, fragility, sociability, reproduction, larval development, life span/age, living habit, adult movement, feeding habit, and skeleton. Each trait has several modalities that categorize the trait. Then, each invertebrate species has an assigned weighting between 0-3 for each modality within a trait to allow for plasticity in trait expression. A 0 score means that a modality was not expressed and 3 score indicates that the modality was expressed strongly by a taxon. Functional traits can inform about ecosystem functioning.